From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
This is the second in a series of three talking about the Mesoamerican codices
that are in the collections of the Library of Congress
The one we're going to be talking about today is
one of the earliest ones to come into the Library's collections, the Oztoticpac Lands Map,
No one is really sure exactly when this particular map came into the Library's collection
It has been theorized that it came into the collection as early as 1905.
But it remained unknown pretty much until April of 1965
when it was pointed out by some of the map mounters, people mounting maps on backing,
here at the Library. It was pointed out to one of the map curators and that's where it it kind of came into the scholarly orbit of
Map historians and Mesoamerican historians,
so we don't really know very much about the actual history
When there was a big census being done for the Handbook of Middle American Indians
which was published by Tulane throughout the sixties and seventies
and a lot of the Mesoamerican codices were researched for that project those researchers
also turned up absolutely no information about the document's history
and its provenance, so we really are working with something that we don't know very much about
As far as where it came from It is, however, an extraordinary document
And we're going to get very deeply into it today.
It is one of the most interesting maps from this period certainly one of the most
interesting indigenous maps that we could possibly sit here and talk about.
Now the map of course is Nahua. It is written in Nahuatl
hieroglyphic writing with, of course, some Roman script, and we'll be talking a bit about that in just a bit
But a little bit of word, a little bit of thought on the language that we're going to be talking about here
Nahuatl's a part, of course, a larger group of languages
and it came into the Mesoamerican orbit and into Mexico migrating down from the southwestern United States
part of a group of languages called the Uto-Aztecan languages related to things like the North American Hopi
language some of the other Native American languages which are in the Southwest
and it appears to have migrated down into the valley of Mexico around 500 AD
Before that time the the Maya languages and a few of the other
Mesoamerican languages had a much longer time period in the area
So there's a certain borrowing that took place and many of the
things that we see on this map and in the Nahua codices are regionalisms that are different
across different areas of the Nahuatl speaking region
Today there are about 28 different dialects of Nahuatl spoken throughout Mexico
by about a million speakers and it's an extremely interesting language group
I'm going to be spending a lot of time today looking at some of the first Written forms, Lands Map was made
the first Romanized forms of Nahua that that actually survive execution
So, the Oztoticpac lands map was made really after the aftermath of a trial and execution of
a local chieftan called Chichimecatecatl and his name is Don Carlos.
He was given the Spanish noble Don and he was executed
in November of 1539. The reasons for that execution
are talked about a little bit on the map, and we'll talk a little bit about that
in just a bit. But you can see the map is a large pictorial map it is
written and drawn on amate or amatl, which the mulberry or fig bark paper typical of
indigenous Nahua, and Aztecs there's many many codices that are on this kind of paper.
The document itself has various areas associated with it. We can see there's
there are these sections of the map which show different things. we're going to go through this in some detail.
I'm going to talk a lot about these big sections of script that you see on map below some of the Maps here because they'll probably
really give us a lot of insight into the history of the document and really into the history of what we're actually looking at when we look at those Oztoticpac Lands Map
So we're going to start up in that left-hand corner and this area here, Tollancinco
which is written right in the in the little box here, which is basically showing
a parcel of land. The little clicks that you see on the sides are
measurements of land of the land if you sort of break this out it measures 102 by 160 feet. One of the things that's very interesting
on the Oztoticpac Lands Map is the parcels of land
we're talking about are not very big even when we get to the Palace of Don Carlos Chichimecatacatl
we are going to see that it's not that huge parcels of land that we've seen some other
Mesoamerican codices like, for instance the Mapa Quetzalecatzin, which we talked about last time
shows a much larger area than the Oztoticpac Lands Map
Now, we see here that there's a lot of script and on the Oztoticpac there is really a couple of Spanish annotations, which are kind of brief
and short and then there's the long, long clauses in Nahuatl
and this is one of the first times that Nahuatl was actually going to be written down on in Roman script. What we're going to see as we get into the map
is a little bit of the Nahuatl hieroglyphic writing. But what's important on the map beyond the hieroglyphics
is this these written pieces of script here,
these Roman scripts. And really what we're looking at
here is we're looking at throughout the map testimony given by the indigenous people themselves
This one is given by one of the Texcocans on the map
Benito Ciuaiunti and basically what this piece of testimony talks about it talks about
Really what the parcel of land and the history of it is
It talks about eyewitness encounters that the
The person who is speaking, not the person who's writing -- the person who is writing was most likely a cleric
Who wrote down this testimony on the map
In Roman script so this was phonetically
sounded out
testimony from this Texcocan
Benito Ciuaiunti
It talks about the history of the parcel of land and it talks about an eyewitness encounter that had
seen Don Carlos when there was a discussion about who owned this piece land and really what we're attempting
to establish with this map it made
For the use in a Spanish court or courts
There's a land dispute that will take place after the execution of Don Carlos in November of 1539
We get on that on
the
figure, this is going to be a central feature of the map
There are lots of little glyphs in the center here we see these
Cacao beans and basically the cacao here
basically the amount of cacao and
what we're seeing here is Don Carlos actually owns this piece of property that this parcel according to the testimony is in fact
private property and it's really talking about the amount of tribute needed in order to
to rent and lease some of the properties so the map is really going to get in a lot of detail about
property law
how property is handled in Nahua and Aztec society
and it is a great insight into the sort of
bureaucratic superstructure
Of Nahua culture and how land was was really treated
Now one of the features on the map
Is going to be this palace up on the one hill up on the
top corner, the left-hand corner there is this large piece of land here
Which really is the largest piece of property on the map itself and it is a sort of palace complex with
outbuildings and
We'll get into exactly how big this is, but there's a couple of glosses
On the the map which are in Nahua also so the one on the top in the red box
Basically is telling us that this particular piece of property is not owned by Don Carlos, but in fact is owned in common
And down below there's another one
That says it was owned by a man named Don Antonio, and we're not really sure
Exactly who some of the people on the map are but we can identify some of them
The gloss itself says "The Palace at Oztotipac belongs to the ruling line and not to Don Carlos"
So we have now two pieces of property, these are both on that left-hand section, one that does belong to
Don Carlos and another one that in fact doesn't
The interesting things about that particular map
Is really in two places
on the right hand side is a section
Taken from the Oztoticpac Lands Map itself and the left-hand side is a fragment
of a map found in the papers of Alexander Humboldt
it is called Alexander Humboldt fragment
And that fragment as you can see is an exact mapping of the Oztotipac
palace on the right hand side
the people pictured on the Humboldt fragment
Are a lot of the people who are going to be involved in this land dispute
And they're actually shown on the Humboldt fragment, but they don't appear at all on the Oztoticpac Lands Map
Below the plus there is a large
Gloss and that gloss is made by another
indigenous testimonial
Which basically talks about the properties being the estates of Don Carlos belonging to the entire family
and that this
This itself is not fully owned by Don Carlos
Now, Really what we have here when we start looking at this in detail and
putting all of the testimonial together
We're really looking at an attempt
whether by Don Carlos's family or by some of his
commoners and freeholders who are in his employ and renters to attempt to
kind of, grasp onto the land rights that they believe are theirs
both traditionally and under Spanish law
So really what we're looking at is
We're looking at a pseudo legal document that is really attempting to, kind of, the history of a particular
group of parcels of land that Don Carlos associated with
and so as we go through, there'll be this continual build up
of the various different kinds of properties that Don Carlos is associated with
And the mapping of Oztoticpac is an
amazing, amazing primary source for
getting a handle on
ownership law
agricultural law, how and tributes were paid
vthe idea of rental property, the idea of ownership
And the idea of hereditary ownership within Nahua and Aztec society
And it really does paint an extremely complex picture, as all sort of mysterious primary source documents do.
This particular document
asks a lot more questions than it answers a lot of the time
Now, this property that we see on the map is in fact this,this palace and
none of the properties are that big this one is, as I said, six hundred and seventy-eight by six hundred and thirty-three feet which is not extremely large.
And we can really tell how big the properties are because while surveyed, every one of the
the properties shown on the map has these dots
Around the perimeter and each of those
Basically are giving us the length of the particular pieces of property. It's not very difficult to reconstruct
the actual sizes of the properties from the actual measurements themselves
The surveys
are in the Nahua units which are easily convertible to
feet and standard units now, but this entire property is about 678 by 633
so not a gigantic
pallet by any stretch of the imagination
So, this is just to look at the inside of the
pass itself, with its little outbuildings, and some of the the actual way it's broken up.
We're not really sure what any of the things you night here mean, but in both this and the Humboldt
representation of the palace the
figures are exactly the same
So, this gives us a little bit of insight into what the actual property, and what the palace looked like.
Now, the most interesting parts of the map
is the right hand, left -- right hand top side
And this is an extremely complex layout of
properties again
And, it's a
complex mashup of all different kinds of property plans kind of thrown together
And it tells us, in one of the glosses that this is Octicpac
which means, in Nahua, "above the road"
And, we can see on the bottom here the little feet in this road so this is the road
And all these properties are above the road
We're not really sure exactly where this piece of property and where any of these are
today
Nothing on the map can really be located precisely. The Oztoticpac
that does exists today outside of Mexico City
But no one can really say for sure where these particular pieces of property are
All we know now is if this is
Complex or property plans and that we have
this above the road
We have this Spanish gloss here
which basically tells us that all of these properties down here, these these smaller plots are are basically for commoners
And so basically these
Are either rented or or owned by the people in kind
There are forty-five of the heads that we see on the right hand side, there's the head with a flag which is 20
plus 20 plus five there are 45, and if you count the plots here, there are in fact forty five plots
and we also see
Here there are these other smaller plots very linear
plots which a gloss here tells us are actually rented out and that there are ten of these and here are the ten heads
Associated with the ten plots
And then here we have a whole bunch of
??tribute and numerical tribute, and what the
Glyphs? of when tribute is to be paid, in other words, when rent is to be paid for the properties
Each of the
Plots have a little glyph in them which is, in fact, the name of either the owner or the piece of property itself
And so every one of these glyphs has its own little owner
Just to blow this up a little bit
here are some of the the glyphs that we find in those plot again with all of the
Measurements of each plot, and then the glyphs that name the actual plot itself
These are the tribute
Markers that have been put on the map and one of the most interesting things that I find are the boundary markers
The boundary markers, which are even used today in some areas, are these agave plants
And we can see these agave plants,
they show how many agave plants are marking the boundaries
And even agave plants are used to mark field boundaries, and so we see that same thing
These are sort of difficult to pick up, you've really got to magnify the map
A great deal
See these agave plants, but they're agave
boundry markers
Now one of the fascinating parts of the map and the thing that
people are drawn to immediately when they look at it are these place named glyphs on
the left hand side and then these very stylized trees and bushes that
that exist on the map
and what we're actually looking at, here because the date of this map is 1539
It's not exactly sure when the map was made
But it had to be between late 1539 and sometime in
1540 so that is the time frame that we're really looking at for the construction of the map
And, so what we hear is really the first botanical document from from the New World
that we know of
And what we actually see is, we see the various places that are associated
this Oztoticpac down here, and then we see these trees and then numbers of trees
so we've got these inventories
The same way that we have the markers for the boundaries or for the lengths and distances of various plots of land, we have tree inventories.
And we've got a whole different group of trees
We've got apples, pears, pomegranates and grapevines and what we actually see is we actually see grafting
I think this is kind of fascinating because these sorts of graftings are done even today
and we've got pears, pomegranates, and apples being grafted onto native root stock
It's actually the same way a modern graft is done
You can see down on the left hand side and on the right hand side these are two apple tree grafts
You can actually see the the graft marks and the cuts
where the grafting is actually done, so they're a fairly realistic
rendition what what these grafts would would really look like
This is one of of the graphs also
Same exact thing
it's grafted here and grafted here, and this is really the grafting of grapes onto native root stock and
It's a kind of a fascinating botanical
look at really what was
actually happening on the ground during a very early period
We are really talking,you know, about only 20 years after the conquest
by Cortés in 1519, we are just in 1539
so we've already developed a lot of infrastructure
a lot of, sort of
iterative¿¿
idea ??? and a lot of farming practices
With the Old World that's being grafted onto native root stock
And so it's a kind of a fascinating little
glimpse into the cultural practices in in this particular area of Mexico at the time
Now, trees and exotic fruits are a part of a contract that Don Carlos seems to have with a man named Pedro de Verga
And Pedro de Verga was in business with Don Carlos
And really what they're doing is they´re growing a lot of exotic fruits that were popular and expensive in Europe
Whether they're either selling them to the local Spanish settlers or sending them back to Europe, no one really knows.
With the inventories that we have, we can count up the number of trees
and so you know pear trees: 67
quince trees: 125
Apples: 103
the pomegranates and peaches we can't tell
and there are 27 grapevines
So, it's not a small orchard when one thinks that one has between just quince and apples more than 200 trees
Of those two things
So, again some real insight into
into a
Bureaucracy and almost a
The business that have been going on between the indigenous and the Spanish at this period
One of the most fascinating things about this
document is this
constant look into how both of these groups are interacting with one another and how both the
Indigenous and the Spanish are sort of accommodating each other
during this period
one of the things that you can think
When looking at this document is if this was to be argued in the Spanish Court
and if these land rights are being claimed
The way we believe they are in the document
what we're really seeing here is that we´re seeing that by
1539 and 1540
at least part of the indigenous peoples in the Valley of Mexico or around Oztoticpac and south of
Mexico City beginning to, at least, exercise some
attempt at claiming rights in a Spanish court
and so if this is an attempt
if this document is, as many scholars believe it to be,
a document that's used in a Spanish Court to attempt to recover
lands that were confiscated by by the Crown
after the execution of Don Carlos
We really do see the beginnings of a certain accommodation
At least on the part of the indigenous peoples for acceptance
of Spanish law and working in Spanish law
Now
We talked to of you who were here and listened to the Codex Quetzalecatzin piece. We talked a lot in that piece about
About ethnobotanical content of the manuscript
again here we are
At the point where we are looking at a bit of ethnobotany
At least what we're looking at is we´ll look at some agricultural practices
And so we're also getting a sense
not only of sort of land ownership rights
But also of land use
how was land used during this period what was the
what was important
And, we can see in some of the commoner plots
the size of the plots are fairly small, but if one looks at other
indigenous cultures
they used
agriculture in the same way
The plots are really about the same size
They're for the most part these subsistence plots that
That people are renting who either work or are in the employ of Don Carlos or who live in the area as commoners
The majority of the words that we see on the manuscript here that talk about
That agriculture
Appear in Nahua
And furthermore, of course, had to come later
So, in other words they're later Nahua names, they're not Nahua names that predate the conquest
And some of the things that we associated with the map and some of the botanical
language associated with what was being grown
and for instance the pears, the pomegranates, the quince
the grapes
The apples
all of which up here on the on the map itself in their Nahua names
And so, very much like we see the glyphs
With which one can really tell what the species of the plant are
by looking at the glyph.
This is very much the same as we saw on the
Quetzalecatzin when we talked about the botanical structures that we really did need the Nahuatl transcription into Roman
letters and really to understand what the
what plants actually are
One of the the most fascinating parts of the map will conclude this particular piece on the right-hand side
And this little piece of text is both
It has the Spanish gloss on top and then a Nahua
Long, Nahua gloss
And this particular piece of property is called the Huehuexoxotl
And the lease shows the Lands of Huehuexoxotl
The gloss says that Don Carlos
And it tells us that he died on the Feast of Mary Magdalene
So he was executed on the Feast of Mary Magdalene
and it also tells us that he provided well for his mistresses
It also gives us notes on some of the various affairs that he had
and these
affairs and him having these mistresses were really used by the Inquisition against him
Regarding the question of why Don Carlos was executed
There is some talk about the fact that he did keep his
He gave this particular plot of land to his sister
his sister had inherited it
Xoxul is her name, and she inherited it, and he then managed it, and then he gave it back to her.
She had a daughter whose name is Ines Tonal and Don Carlos kept her as a mistress and had two daughters with her
Several other places on the map we can sense thatat Don Carlos was a real a
real
A player
And that he, at least according to the indigenous testimony, attempted to swindle people out of pieces of property
currently had his
His ear to the ground to try and figure out which pieces of property were occupied
Who owned them, who was dying, who which piece of property he could buy up
And really this
combined with the fact that that he had kept his mistresses -- his niece as mistress -- and had two daughters out of wedlock
have
Directed the attention of the Inquisition at him
He certainly was an important
an important
Local person in the area andcame from an important family who whose noble line goes back quite a ways
even before
the
The coming of the Spanish
before the contact period
And so really what, what we see in the map is we see
to a certain extent we see the life of Don Carlos kind of played out after his death we see that he was a
local chieftain who attempted to aquiredor participe she's of lands and rented them out
This seems to have been even before the
Contact or coming of the Spanish he had his
Niece as mistress and and and had a couple of daughters by her
We this is life of an individual really play out on this map
And we'll also see is we see
the ascent of his heirs
attempting to reassert
their right to this piece of property and whether those rights are through hereditary
Or through the fact that they inherited,
Or whether the fact that the confiscation of particular parts of these properties
which Don Carlos did not own, which were held in common, were illegal and they needed to be returned
It is a critically important primary source document
Really one of the most important maps
in the collections of the Library of Congress
And a critical primary source for anyone who's interested in
both
conquests sort of
of Spanish law by indigenous peoples
And really by the way later Nahua and pre-conquest Nahua dealt with land
and and and
rented out properties to rural farmers and things like that
A critical piece of prior history
Thank you all very much